Meeting the Kings of Carnival in Mérida
Welcome to Yucatán!
We arrived in Mérida, our first stop at the Peninsula of Yucatán. After checking in to our not-so-nice hostel room, we were excited to explore the capital of Yucatán. After wondering why the complete hostel was empty, we found out that we were the very last guests and the hostel would shut down after we leave. Well, that at least explained why the hostel looked the way it did and made us feel a bit honoured.
Some locals in other cities we visited told us that there was a different mentality in Yucatán. Not knowing what they actually meant, we met a lot of friendly people (as everywhere else in Mexico so far). For example, walking through the city center we were stopped by a mid-aged mexican guy who wanted to give us some recommendations which places we should not miss to visit. As he found our that we are from Germany he was very proud to present us the german vocabulary he knows - “Hängematte” (truly one of the most import words to know in a foreign language!)
After getting an impression of the beatiful town of Mérida, we took the public bus to Progreso on the next day, a place at the coast of the Golf of Mexico. As on most of our stops we wondered why this beautiful (and we thought touristic) place was so empty. Seems like we came to visit Mexico quite off-season. But better for us, so we could walk along the promenade without seeing a lot of people. There are some funny sculptures spread over the beach side of Progreso so we could not leave it without taking a lot of photos.
A funny thing about Mexican people is that they love to celebrate everything. In most of the cities we visited there was some kind of celebration at the Zócalo (the main square of the city) on almost every evening. In Mérida as well, so we took part in the festive tribute to this year’s Kings of Carnival which have been elected in the month of february (a totally plausible reason for a party in september, isn’t it?). It was relly nice to see all the traditional clothing and dances the Yucataneans presented and just enjoying the good mood they spread.
On our last day in Mérida we went to Izamal, a traditional Mexican city which is painted in yellow. Here we found an old Maya ruin which we could climb on (the first so far, all other ruins we visited were closed off). Here we had a great view all over the city. As it was easy to take the public bus from Mérida to Izamal, the return trip turned out to be a bit more complicated. Although there was a timetable when the bus should leave it was less clear when and where it really leaves. No problem we thought, we just ask the locals! Well, that was less helpful than we expected as they were very confused of tourists wanting to take the public bus and did not understand our problem. After asking about five people who all pointed to a place and called “Taxi, Taxi!” we decided to just sit down and wait. Luckily, we could jump on a bus at a while.
On the next day we directly applied our newfound knowledge about using pulic busses and went to our next stop, Valladolid. You can read about that in our next post!